About large database projects (ADP)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Patrick Wolf
  • Start date Start date
P

Patrick Wolf

In the Access 2003 help file is written:
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Design development, test, and production databases

If you have two databases with identical structure, you can make changes in
one database and propagate those changes to the other. For example, if you
have a personal development database and a group-wide test database, you can
modify the development database, then propagate those changes to the test
database.
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Does anyone know how to propagate changes from a development database to a
test database as mentioned above (apart from doing it totally manually :) )

Thanks a lot
Patrick
 
Personally, I like to use SQL-Compare from RedGate (www.red-gate.com). Not
exactly free but it's worth every penny. By doing a Google search, you will
find many other similar tools on the Internet.

You can also use other things such as transactional replication, log
shipping, DBGhost or even a database project from Visual Studio for
propagating these changes but usually, it's much more easier to use a
comparaison tool for doing this.

Don't forget than modifying a database and then propagating those changes
are not always the same thing. For example, renaming a column in Enterprise
Manager gives you exactly that: the column is renamed but the data is still
there. Later, if you chose to propagate this change with a comparaison tool,
the column will not get renamed in the production database but instead will
be destroyed and another column created to replace it with, of course,
destruction of the old datas in this column. Some of the above tools
doesn't have this limitation.
 
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